Word: cookham
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...color pages), ranging from the visions of William Blake to the hallucinatory portraits of Francis Bacon, from the landscapes of Turner and Constable to the cool, elegant abstractions of Ben Nicholson and Stanley Spencer's portrayal of a New Jerusalem near his green and pleasant home town of Cookham (TIME...
...last week with a retrospective of 83 oils at London's Tate Gallery. The paintings represented a lifetime devoted to religious themes−all depicted in the comfortable everyday terms of barnyards, country lanes and the River Thames around Painter Spencer's small native Berkshire village of Cookham (pop. 5,900) 27 miles west of London. Burning Bush. The son of a church organist Spencer got his training at London's Slade School of Fine Art, served as a medical corpsman and infantry soldier in World War I before returning to Cookham. It was in Cookham that...
Such treatment of religious themes, peopled with Cookham's ham-handed menfolk and bosomy barmaids painted in flat, low-keyed colors, has kept Artist Spencer a storm center. Harrumphed Fellow Artist Sir Winston Churchill: "If that is the Resurrection. I can contemplate with considerable equanimity the prospect of eternal sleep." But it has also brought Spencer fame, if not riches, including membership in the Royal Academy and the order of Commander of the British Empire...
Button for Perfection. The current Tate retrospective shows why. While earning a living by turning out popular landscapes and portraits, Spencer has devoted the past 22 years to decorating a "chapel in the air" whose dimensions are nothing less than Cookham itself, with the main street for the nave, the River Thames as "a side aisle." Into it, Spencer fits his Pentecost, Cana and "couples" cycles, filling them out with Bruegelesque pictures of everyday life. Nothing is too mundane to leave out. Says Spencer: "All ordinary acts such as the sewing on of a button are religious things...
Latest work for Spencer's proposed chapel is a series on Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta. For one panel, Listening from Punts (see cut), Spencer has drawn on his boyhood memories of Edwardian regatta-goers who arrived for river-barge concerts. "From people listening to Bach," says he, "it's not such a long step to people listening to Christ. It's almost the same, nearly there. So I decided to make it Christ preaching a sermon." Spencer liked the idea so much that he plans to repeat the subject on the other side of the Thames...